Standard accounts of literary history posit a reorientation, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, from the play to the novel,
exteriority to interiority, public to private. Scholars describe a new
set of ontological priorities, privileging an intensive, focused mode of
accessing information--best facilitated by a printed page--over and
against a notion of the world in which reality is performatively
produced and communally experienced. I would like to contest this
history, and to do so by way of a rather unlikely text for the task: the
epitomically "Scriblerian" comedy Three Hours After Marriage
(1717), written by John Gay with collaboration from John Arbuthnot and
Alexander Pope. The unlikeliness of this counterexample stems from the
traditional construal of the Scriblerians (Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, and
Swift) (1) as pursuing a quintessentially print-based strategy of
satire--creating typographically elaborate tomes; becoming the first
writers to make a living from the print market; and chastising
"bad" uses of print and encouraging others. (2) I want to
demonstrate, however, that Three Hours After Marriage in fact valorizes
an improvisatory and performative mode of interpreting the world in
addition to a more "reading"-based mode. That is, in this play
of disguises, cunning, and quick changes, "meaning" derives
not only from the diligent design and decipherment of surfaces, but from
dynamic processes of transformation and performativity. Yet neither is
the play simply a celebration of theater over text: rather, I will
argue--with reference as well to a few of Pope's
so-called"minor" poems from the same period--that Three Hours
ultimately privileges a (literally--as we will see)
"bastardized" mode of art, combining the fixed and the
metamorphic, the textual and the oral, the abstract and the embodied. In
this way, Three Hours After Marriage proposes a new genre that allows
for the "printification" of drama, the
"performativization" of print.

I. The Problematization of Genre in Three Hours After Marriage

The melding of media that I am here ascribing to Three Hours After
Marriage does not accord with the reigning narratives of genre history.
In English Dramatic Form, Laura Brown concludes that
late-seventeenth-century drama, hampered by its baggage of ideology and
theatrical convention, found itself unable to address a new world-order:
the Enlightenment's emerging realist epistemology, along with an
increasingly democratic ethos and the capitalist values of an ever-more
bourgeois and imperialist Britain, all favored the novel. (3)
Significantly, these same changes could be said to have favored print as
well, with its emphasis on documented, cross-indexable information,
affordable popular editions, and an ever-more commercially driven market
for broadsides, periodicals, and books of all kinds. J. Paul Hunter
likewise emphasizes many of the same cultural shifts in his depiction of
an eighteenth-century literature that "no longer ... trusted ...
group reactions" one that believed that "the route to
influence was a private and subjective one, to be found only in private
converse between a fixed book and the response of an individual reader,
deciding silently and alone." (4) All of these changes favored the
page over the stage.

However, Three Hours, though written long after the peak of the
Restoration Theater and well into the period of the novel's
"rise," (5) ultimately privileges an epistemology very
different from that described by Brown and Hunter: Three Hours suggests,
indeed, that we can most effectively navigate our world not only by
"reading" reality, but also by staging, mimicking, and
feigning it. Yet neither does the play constitute a mere throwback to
the libertine performativity of the Restoration; rather, it sets out to
explore the very boundaries of both print and performance.

Such avant-gardism might seem unlikely given the premise of Three
Hours, which seems to embody the libertine convention: two rakes attempt
to sleep with the devious Susannah Townley within three hours after her
marriage to the crusty Doctor Fossile, thus cuckolding him even before
the union has been consummated. But, as we will see, the very
conventionality of the plot serves Three Hours' larger
investigation of genre, working indeed as a kind of parody. For Three
Hours is, in many ways, about the cliches of dramatic writing and the
rules, official or unofficial, by which it runs.

One of the primary ways that the play examines and explodes
dramatic cliche is via the figure of Doctor Fossile's niece, the
would-be dramatist Phoebe Clinket. Although scholars have long deemed
Clinket merely as a misogynistic lampoon of women writers and of bad
writers in general, (6) the character also serves to initiate Three
Hours' complex interrogation of genre. Specifically, Clinket's
creative output actually manifests a comprehensive interweaving of
theater and textuality. For example, famously, the would-be
playwright's serving-maid, Prue, bears Clinket's writing-desk
on her back, a spectacular detail that highlights drama's writerly,
textual aspect: as Clinket thinks of new ideas for the stage, she
immediately sets to writing them; and the intense physical presence of
the writing-desk emphasizes a newborn play's embeddedness in the
paraphernalia of paper, ink, pens (Clinket appears with an ink-stained
headdress and with quills sticking out of her hair), crossed-out words,
second and third drafts. (7) On the other hand, in her first line of
dialogue Prue compares her burden to "a Raree-Show" (1.73),
drawing attention to the theatrical component of textuality: after all,
Clinket's pens, inks, and papers are all turned to theatrical props
as she employs them before our eyes; dramatically, the materials
introduce her character. This double-status of the dramatic text as
writerly object and staged production is again emphasized when Clinket,
having had her works thrown into the fire by an exasperated Fossile,
loudly mourns the loss of "half an Epilogue" but also of
"three Copies of recommendatory Verses! and two Greek Mottos!"
(1.568, 573)--thus conceiving of her work on the one hand as oratory and
public presentation (the "Epilogue" is the moment at which the
actors acknowledge the audience and solicit approbation of their skills)
and, on the other, as a collection of shuffleable, interchangeable
scraps of paper inserted by the printer upon publication.

With Phoebe Clinket, then, Three Hours begins to thematize the two
ontological modes of the drama; bur the play then proceeds explicitly to
play theater and text off of one another, tracing the process by which
each mode is actually engaged in a constant struggle to overtake the
other. The play does this by correlating each of the two modes with a
different set of characters and characteristics--connecting textuality,
I would argue, with Fossile and his colleagues (and hence, as we will
see, with a sterile conservationism and curatorialism) while linking
performativity with Townley and her lovers (and thereby with a prolific
and sexualized promiscuity). As each set of characters attempts to gain
power over the other, so too the ontological elements that they
represent come to clash and collide; it is this interaction that
supplies the play's comic foundation, motors its primary turns of
plot, and underlies its ending, which, I will contend, finally
celebrates overtly the "bastardization" of genre that,
insistently, if implicitly, has constituted the very center of the play.

II. The Textualization of Theater, and the Theatricalization of
Text

The "collision" of modes that I have been describing
takes place perhaps most visibly through the figure of Doctor Fossile,
whose main pursuit, throughout the plot, can be summarized as an attempt
to flatten transitory actions into readable surfaces--in other words,
making theater into text. This attempt can be seen in Fossile's
obsession with symbols and signs, a belief that everything can be
"put into writing," as it were, and that, if he simply
examines a surface with enough care, he can discern the truth of a
situation.

Most of these truths are sexual in nature. For example, Fossile
yearns for a "visible Token" by which to obtain news of a
woman's "Defloration" (2.63): "Why are there no
external Symptoms ... of the Loss of Virginity but a big Belly? Why has
not Lewdness its Tokens like the Plague?" In other words, Fossile
longs for a stable physical sign by which to know of a momentary event
("defloration") or even attitude ("lewdness" or,
later, "shame"; 2.470)--to convert these ephemeral
comportments into stable textual emblems (like the inky blotches on the
bodies of Black Death victims). He wishes in particular, of course, for
the ability to see or read his own wife's infidelity, and later
believes he has gained this ability in the form of a liquid promising to
produce a rash on the faces of non-virgins: Plotwell, posing as a
European doctor, offers Fossile the use of his "Touch stone of
Virginity" which causes "de large red Spot [to] appear upon de
Cheek; which me call de spot of Infamy" (2.306-7). Of course, the
result is that while Townley continues to execute outrageous stratagems
under his nose, Fossile stands futilely "por[ing] upon her
Cheek" (2.440).

But not only does Fossile wish that women's sexual experiences
could be registered visually; he wants to put the act of sex itself into
service as a kind of document. Thus, he urges Townley to consummate her
marriage with him so that no one may "dispute [his] Title to [her]
Person" and so that their matrimony will receive its
"Sear" (1.18). Indeed, all of Fossile's desire for
Townley could be said to derive from a desire to rewrite, to re-sign, to
reseal, a specific document, namely his Will. As he explains upfront, he
wishes to disinherit his niece. Indeed, in Townley's (and the
reader's/audience's) very first introduction to Clinket,
Fossile announces, "In a former Will I had left her my Estate; but
I now resolve that Heirs of my own Begetting shall inherit"
(1.69-71). He accordingly speaks of his marriage in terms of the
production of heirs: he postpones the couple's bedtime until ten
o'clock, "an Hour, if Astrology is not fallible, successful in
Generation" (1.57), and equates marital joy/pleasure with
fertility: "How happy shalt thou make me! thou shalt bring me the
finest Boy" (3.329-30). Indeed, the notion of conjugal sex as
text--as providing a sealed contract and "title" to
Townley's person, but also as producing an addendum crucial to the
reordering of his other estate papers--is an ideal whose centrality in
the play becomes most obvious, ironically, in its collapse. As we will
see, the catastrophe of the play, from Fossile's perspective,
consists not only in his having married a wife that is no wife, but in
his receipt of an heir that is no heir.

Yet Fossile's struggle to convert profligate practices into
decipherable documents arguably comes to its dramatic (and comedic)
climax in an earlier scene, when Fossile and his fellow scholars come
upon the disguised rakes Plotwell and Underplot, and proceed doggedly to
pursue hieroglyphic meanings in what are, in fact, the very embodiments
of theatricality. The rakes' disguises--that of a mummy and a
crocodile--are linked specifically, in the play, to theatrical contexts:
they have been borrowed from "the Play-house" (3.32), and the
young men imagine themselves being "proclaim'd at a Show of
Monsters, by the Sound of a Glass-Trumpet," or being "given to
a Mountebank" (3.79, 83). But of course, the scholars immediately
fall to scrutinizing their surfaces (literally: they study "... the
Visage.... the Face"; 3.126-31), and compare the costumed figures
to Fossile's other curiosities, many of which, as we will see,
constitute specifically textual treasures. Significantly, moreover, the
scholars' discussion of the mummy's superficies in particular
ultimately centers on the question of his sex--a "Bloom upon the
Face" supposedly indicates a female mummy, whereas a certain
"Formation of the Muscular Parts of the Visage" points to a
male. But despite (or, actually, because of) this consideration of the
mummy's sex-as-text, the scholars remain oblivious to the kinetic
sexuality just below, ready to burst its plaster casing. The
scientists' acts of reading thus attempt to turn Plotwell's
spectacularly copulativistic sex drive into a scrupulously separatory
sexonomy--to transform dynamic carnality into dogmatic categorization.

Meanwhile, however, Townley and her accomplices are engaged in an
equal and opposite effort to adapt and metamorphose texts for their own
performative--and sexually prolific--purposes. Just as Fossile wants to
reduce sexual desire and sexual acts to documents, Townley manipulates
documents improvisationally so as to maximize the possibilities for
spontaneous and unregulated sexuality--all the while maintaining a
(fragile) facade

of respectability. As we learn from the very first scene, Townley has
procured her hasty marriage to Fossile by way of a "Blank
License" a predrafted form that can be filled in, and manipulated
ad libitum. Such licenses are "wonderful commodious," Townley
marvels: all one has to do is "produce ... a Warrant" (1.5-7).
But warrants become, in Townley's hands, unlimited and unfixed: in
the play's final scene, a rival Warrant appears, testifying to
Townley's previous marriage to another man (3.531). The
conspicuously artificial ending that this latter Warrant
provides--instantaneously dissolving all of Fossile's authority
over Townley at just the moment when her guilt becomes indisputable
(through the discovery of her bastard child)--exposes these legal
documents as arbitrary: unconnected to reality, their power amounts to
nothing bur mutual cancellation.

But, as we soon see, not only does Townley escape, and expose, the
confines of the written word, she actively performs them away. When
Fossile intercepts a letter from Plotwell, Townley instantly
reinterprets it, line by line (1.241-64), metamorphosing
"Person" (here referring to a bawd) into
"Parson"--"only a Word mis-spell'd!"--and
feminine to masculine: when Fossile objects to the idea that this
"Parson" is a "She," Townley explains, ludicrously,
"the Welsh always say Her instead of His." Moreover, just as
Fossile has his collaborators in his attempt to textualize performance,
Townley is joined in her endeavour to revise performatively the written
word: enlisted into a reading of Clinket's play, she and Plotwell
together rescript the lines--Clinket complains they "perplex the
Drama with Speeches Extempore" (1.352)--in order to convey encoded
information to each other (Townley reports Fossile's plans to
remove her from the sexual dangers of London, and Plotwell pledges to
follow her, all in the melodramatic diction of Clinket's lovers:
"But Haemon, ah, I fear / To Morrow's Eve will hide me in the
Country"--"Through all the Town, with diligent Enquiries, I
sought my Pyrrha"; 1.346-50). Again the concluding triumph is one
of the body over the "Manuscript" of "Syllable[s]"
(340, 348); Plotwell kisses Townley, in defiance not only of the play as
written, but of the institutional boundaries of dramatic literature:
"Fye, Mr. Plotwell," exclaims Clinket, "this is against
all the Decorum of the Stage; I will no more allow the Libertinism of
Lip-Embraces than the Barbarity of Killing" (355-56). Indeed,
Clinket suggests, such lustiness defies the very codes and systems of
civilization (descending into "barbarity").

Finally, Townley's suitors join in on Townley's
performativization of texts by activizing their costumed
bodies--transferring their significatory power away from the outer
layers that Fossile pores over, and putting them to use not as
inspectable surfaces, but as implicatory symbols. Thus, although the
rakes initially vie to impress Townley with their costumes'
surface-beauties ("See how I am embroider'd with
Hieroglyphicks"--"Consider my beautiful Row of Teeth";
88-90), their referents stray further and further from the immediately
visible, shifting to the metaphorical and the potential (and the
sexual)--"My erect Stature"--"My long Tail"
(93-94)--until at last they offer to abandon the costumes' readable
object-hood altogether, in favor of pure (sexualized) action: "Take
me out of my Shell, Madam, and I'll make you a Present of the
Kerner"--"Then I must be upon a Level with him, and be
uncrocodird!" (96-99).

Thus Three Hours traces the textualization of performed action and
the performativization of texts, but, crucially, I think, avoids
aligning itself unequivocally with either mode. For neither set of
characters entirely wins our sympathies. Fossile and his colleagues in
the "textual" camp ultimately come across as blind and
impotent; but the modus operandi of Townley and her
"performative" faction proves equally empty.

As we have already begun to see, textuality is consistently linked
to sterility and petrification--indeed, with fossilization:
Fossile's medical practice relies on rocks and minerals; he has
promised Lady Longfort his "Eagle-stone" (2.215), and the
Sailor in the final act associates him with "Oyster-shells and
Pebble-stones" (3.352). His virgin-proving-potion is specifically
stone-based: it is called the "Lapis Lydius Virginitatis, or
Touchstone of Virginity" (2.301), and is explicitly disassociated
from imagination and animation: when Clinket fears that the drops will
influence "the Virgin's Dreams, Thoughts, and private
Meditations" Fossile reassures her, "They do not affect the
motus Primo-primi ... only Actualities, Niece" (2.472-75). Most
importantly, Fossile's prized examples of "actual"
textuality are chiseled engravings; thus he cherishes a piece of
Noah's journal from the flood, "hewn of a Porphyry Pillar in
Palmyra" (3.121-25), along with "a Fragment of Seth's
Pillar." (8)

But, at the opposite extreme, Clinket and her collaborators
threaten the world of the play with anarchy and amorality; their modus
operandi privileges desire, not love. Of course, one could claim that
"love" has no place in this play, which, after all, pushes
libertine comedy to its crudest extreme--except that the play itself
reinforces such an ideal in its final moments: when (as we will examine
in more detail below) Townley's bastard child appears on the scene
in act 3, a humanistic note is also gently introduced, preparing for a
final tableau in which Fossile stands baffledly but acceptantly
"caress [ing]" the child in his arms (3.552).

III. Bastardized Genres

Perhaps what the play could be said to endorse, then, is not
theatricality as an exclusive category that rivals textuality, but
rather those elements of theatricality that allow for generic fluidity
and epistemological experimentation. Thus, much of what Three Hours
emphasizes about theatricality is specifically its ability to
interrogate categories: for example, Plotwell and Underplot's
costumes play to Fossile's zoological and archaeological interests,
of course, but both costumes also embody states of
in-betweenness--between earth and sea, between life and death. As the
play's Epilogue points out, the Crocodile "reaps the Blessings
of his double Nature" living alternately "on Land or
Water" (11. 10-12), while the Mummy, "Dead as he
seem'd.... had sure signs of Life" (16). Both manifest an
ability to transcend even the most elemental boundaries. Likewise, just
as the specific kind of theatricality represented by the rakes'
costumes is a theatricality of transformation or hybridity, so too
Clinket's proposed play posits a mid-deluvian, topsy-turvy world,
in which cattle swim, whales perch in trees, clouds and oceans change
places. Indeed, the flood and fluidity of Clinket's imagined
theater allows for the transformation of stone itself--which, as we have
seen, serves in Three Hours as a symbol for solidity and permanence,
and, in particular, the solidity and permanence of print-based modes of
representation. After Deucalion and Pyrrha "[throw] Stones ...
behind them" in Clinket's first act, we learn, these stones
become metamorphosed into "almost all the Persons of [the] Second
Act" (1.478-79). Here, even stone (and, by extension, the print
world values that it has come to be associated with) takes on
protean--and, indeed, procreative--powers. Crucially, then, the kind of
theatricality being represented in both of the above examples is one
that does not trample textuality, but rather brings it to life--turning
hieroglyphed or hieroglyphable surfaces (mummy, stones) into living,
breathing presences.

In its celebration of a hybridized, theatrico-textual mode of art,
then, Three Hours After Marriage profoundly complicates our usual
account of the eighteenth century's privileging of page over stage.
Indeed, the account is only further complicated by the fact that the
play was written at least in part by Pope--known specifically for his
investment in the print medium, for his obsessive involvement in the
details of his books' publication. (9) Indeed, Pope seemed to want
to purge print itself of any vestigial performativity: he anchored
Shakespeare's work in a scholarly edition, while issuing
monumentalizing collections of his own poems. Meanwhile, he was joined
in this project of literary stabilization by Swift, who famously
advocated for the fixing and rigidifying of language in his
"Proposal for ... Correcting the English Tongue." (10) Such
mockery by both writers of the ephemerality and faddishness that print
can foster--the almanac, the pamphlet attack, the scandal-mongering news
brief, the esoteric treatise, the dubious travelogue, the outlandish
autobiography--came to define the Scriblerian ethos. (This same ethos
extended, notably, to the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, which, like
Three Hours After Marriage, was also coauthored by Arbuthnot.) (11) But
in the end, I would argue, Three Hours actually continues many elements
of the Scriblerian print-based project, effecting not a generalizing
condemnation of reading as an epistemological mode, but rather a
critique of the kinds of reading that refuse to incorporate an
interactive, performative way of encountering the text.

IV. The Scientific versus the Somatic

As scholars have often pointed out, the primary mode of reading to
which the Scriblerians objected was what they saw as a kind of
"scientific" approach to texts; indeed, their animosity toward
such practices obviously informs Three Hours' depiction of Doctor
Fossile. Thus according to C. O. Brink, the underlying reason for
Pope's hostility toward the classicist Richard Bentley (who comes
in for mockery in the satire Sober Advice from Horace as well as the
Dunciad) was that Bentley relocated questions of literary interpretation
from "culture to science, the science being the new classical
scholarship and criticism." (12) Miriam Starkman likewise notes
that "Bentley as critic would not have provoked so much nor so
acerbic satire had he not been 'scientific' in his criticism.
It is in satire of Bentley's attempts to methodize and systematize classical learning that he is ridiculed as ... a dealer in ... indices
and compendiums" (13) Texts should be appreciated as cultural
artifacts rather than scientific specimens, imbibed as humanistic wholes
rather than minced into alphabetized indices.

Interestingly, though, this protest against "scientific"
kinds of reading is, in many ways, a protest against print culture
itself: arguably, the print medium both originates out of, and enables,
the methods and thought patterns of scientific inquiry. Thus Walter Ong
contends that "modern science" was a "consequence"
of print, because "what is distinctive of modern science is the
conjuncture of exact observation and exact verbalization" made
possible by a text that no longer depends on scribal copyists for
replication. (14) Furthermore, "the availability of carefully made,
technical prints ... implemented such exactly worded descriptions,"
and "technical prints and technical verbalization reinforced and
improved each other" (15) Finally, the "sense of closure"
that print encourages--"a sense that what is found in a text has
been finalized, has reached a state of completion"--likewise
promotes "analytic philosophical or scientific work" the kinds
of investigations that can confidently base themselves on a seemingly
comprehensive set of information. (16) Likewise, Julie Stone Peters
describes the "overlapping histories" of science and print as
"institutional structures": "'Modern' natural
history relies on ... print to disseminate, for example, the graphs and
engravings crucial to it; print as a trade ... improves its technology
with the help of science." (17)

Thus an attack on scientific uses of printed texts would seem to be
an attack on print culture itself; and perhaps, at moments, it is. But
certainly for authors who utilized the technologies of print as
gleefully as Pope, Swift, and Gay (whose 1716 poem Trivia was playfully
indexed and annotated), such an attack seems deeply paradoxical. And
yet, upon further consideration, the historical connection between
science and print need not automatically preempt any attempt to conceive
of these two sets of cultural practices within separate spheres. Indeed,
it is by understanding their institutional intertwinedness that we can
better appreciate the vast scope of any project aiming to
"de-scientificize" the world of print: to attempt such a
project constitutes a reimagining of the very epistemological core of
print culture.

Some initial gestures toward such a reimagining can be seen in
Pope's poetry, where, at various crucial moments, the paradigm of
"science" in relation to texts, becomes replaced by the
paradigm of the corporeal, of the body in motion. Of course, this is the
same dichotomy with which we became familiar in Three Hours After
Marriage, in which Fossile's attempts at defining, evidencing, and
taxonomizing clash with Townley's (et al.) fast-moving physical
antics. However, in Three Hours, as we have seen, Fossile's
scientism aligns itself with textuality, while Townley's
physicality integrates theatricality; Pope's poems, in contrast,
propose a textuality that embraces, fits itself to, and takes on, the
human form.

One of the works positing this somatically antiscientific
textuality is the Dunciad. Thus in the passage below, Pope condemns
critic's "microscopic" mode of reading specifically by
invoking the body:

The critic Eye, that microscope of Wit,
Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit:
How parts relate to parts, or they to whole,
The body's harmony, the beaming soul,
Are things which Kuster, Burman, Wasse shall see,
When Man's whole frame is obvious to a Flea. (18)

While the body often serves in Pope's and Swift's poetry
to manifest the decayed, debased, or debauched (one thinks of the
grotesque body of the Goddess Dulness in the Dunciad, or Swift's
dressing-room poems), here, in its role as science's foil, the body
takes on positive connotations--suggesting an ethical imperative in
regard to reading practices; that is, the object of the Critic's
Eye (the text) is figured not simply as a dead lump of tissue that can
be dissected, but as a living presence--a body with an innate
"harmony" of parts, which perfectly reflects and directs the
beams of its "soul."

This ethical element becomes clearest, I think, in Pope's
other major poem about "correct" forms of reading and
knowledge--the Essay on Criticism--where the poet declares,

I know there are, to whose presumptuous Thoughts Those freer
Beauties, ev'n in Them [i.e., the Ancients] seem Faults: Some
Figures monstrous and mis-shap'd appear, Consider'd singly, or
beheld too near, Which, but proportion'd to their Light, or Place,
Due Distance reconciles to Form and Grace. (19)

Here again, misreading is equated with microscopic reading
(beholding texts "too near") or taxonomic reading
("singly"); and, again, to read in this way is to impede their
natural (divine?) "Grace" (174), to hamper the
"free[dom]" inherent in certain kinds of beauties (170). This
emphasis on the freedom of the well-proportioned body seems particularly
important for our purposes, because the textual body that the Essay
portrays is, specifically, a kinetic, mobile body, a body that performs.
Thus in a later passage, explaining what characterizes true Wit in
literature, the poet explains:

In wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts
Is not th' Exactness of peculiar Parts;
'Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call,
But the joint Force and full Result of all.
(243-46)

When we reduce a body to its parts, we limit it to inert,
monosyllabic fragments ("Lip" "Eye"); contrastingly,
we can be affected as whole beings ourselves (in "our Hearts")
only when we consider the human form as something with active, dynamic
"Force" a force that is "joint" (a word that can
mean both "joined" [whole, combined] and "jointed"
[articulated so as to enable mobility, movement]). (20) We respond most
powerfully, then, to a complete body with the ability to do, to perform,
to act on and interact with its environment, to spring vividly upon us
("Result" here invokes its root, resultare, "to
spring," "to leap back"). (21)

Crucially, then, each of the above passages imagines an ideal model
of textuality as on.e that is comprehensively corporeal, over and
against the taxonomizing, taxidermizing influences of a more
"scientific" model of thought. But, most crucially, the
corporeality in question is an active one, performative in its
physicality. In other words, these passages imagine a print world
epistemology that is not only somatic versus scientific, but which
actually uses that somaticism as a bridge to a full-fledged
theatricality. Thus they posit a new epistemology of print that draws on
an entirely separate paradigm--one of the physical, the kinetic, but
also the oral, the communal, the interactive, the participatory.

Perhaps the notion of a "theatrical" text does not, at
first, seem so very anti-Scriblerian: after all, one could say that the
Scriblerians' most print-dependent texts--the Dunciad, A Tale of a
Tub, Gay's Trivia--do put on quite a spectacle: pompous title pages
declaim a tome's contents in imposing font; dashes and asterisks
mischievously draw a curtain over a scene; margin notes and footnotes
point us to jokes we may have missed; readers' testimonies are
paraded before us. But such a claim uses the term theatrical rather
limitedly, as a synonym for "showy" or simply
"visual" My argument goes farther, and will claim--as I have
already been suggesting--that these authors' texts engaged with a
theatricality beyond that of visuality. Rather, I will demonstrate--with
reference to a group of so-called "minor" poems by Pope--that
they also engaged with a specifically oral or performance culture, and
can be seen to propose a model of authorship that is interlocutive,
apostrophizing, metamorphic.

The real importance of these "minor" poems to my
argument, then, is that they begin to sketch more fully an alternative
print epistemology that breaks free of the usual paradigms with which
print is aligned--the modern, the authoritative, the technological--and
instead draws upon the cultural practices relating to the theater,
namely the oral, the shape-shifting, the ritualistic. Likewise, what
these texts outline, I think, is the very same hybridized, bastardized
genre being proposed in Three Hours After Marriage, a mode of literature
that blends textuality and theatricality in what I see as an attempt to
reattach both art forms to human realities and desires. (22)

V. Theatrico-textuality in Pope's "Minor" Poems of
1716-17

At the time that he was collaborating on the writing of Three Hours
After Marriage (produced in 1717), Pope wrote a number of
poems--including the prologue to Three Hours--that take remarkable
pleasure not just in a theatrics of self-presentation (as many of his
texts can be said to do) but also in a theatrics of the noisy, the
garrulous, the communal. This aspect of the poems becomes all the more
remarkable given that Pope composed them in the same year that his first
collected Works appeared--a veritable masterstroke of print culture
savvy and aesthetics. As James McLaverty explains, the Works
strategically used formats, engravings, and size to align Pope's
work with his Homer translations, thus laying claim to modern-classic
status. (23) But if Pope published his Works as a kind of monument (in
the words of McLaverty and of Maynard Mack), (24) his other poems
written in the same year represent a kind of impish undermining of this
beautiful object.

The "minor" poems of 1716-17 constitute a considerable
group, almost all of which experiment with oral or performance culture
roots in the way I have been describing; although their exact dating is
uncertain, the 1716-17 poems could be said to include the poems "To
Mr. John Moore, Author of the Celebrated Worm-Powder" "A Roman
Catholick Version of the First Psalm, For the Use of a Young Lady"
"Sandys's Ghost: Or a Proper New Ballad on the New Ovid's
Metamorphosis," "The Court Ballad," and" Verses Sent
to Mrs. T. B. with his Works. By an Author" as well as other
various "Epigrams" and "occasional" verses. (25)
Several of these, as is already clear from the titles, take a
quasi-ballad or "song" ("psalm") form, which was
highly unusual for Pope; (26) moreover, as we will see, several of them
address an audience directly, and several play with the idea of a
participatory or shifting authorship.

Notably, the group also includes the prologue to Three Hours After
Marriage, and indeed it is this piece that may provide the best
"prologue" to the other poems of the period: beginning with a
series of literary and authorial classifications, the piece initially
seems to be presenting itself as a labor of definition, distinction, and
defense, in line with the scientific language used by Fossile or his
colleague Possum; however, by the end, the speaker has proposed a
reconsideration of literature not as a set of categories (as the work of
a "wit" versus a "fool") but as a gesture, a pose, a
costume to be worn and discarded.

The prologue begins by seeming to cement critical categories: thus
although the first lines deem the "Rules [by which] ... Authors are
judg'd" to be "strange" and "capricious"
(1), their immediate concern is not to dismiss these rules, bur rather
to help us follow them correctly: "Fools are only laugh'd at,
[while] Wits are hated," the speaker complains (4); in other words,
he wants not to obliterate the distinctions between "Fool" and
"Wit," but to make sure we apply them correctly. However, the
next set of lines hint at a more fluid conception of literary
production: for example, we are told that when bad playwrights shift the
blame onto the French writers whose work they've adapted, their
defense falls flat, because

Wit, like Wine, from happier Climates brought,
Dash'd by these Rogues, turns English common Draught.
(13-14)

In other words, far from possessing a stable essence, a play
changes according to its changing surroundings. Thus, while the speaker
excoriates a critical milieu that can't appreciate true wit when it
sees it, he also suggests that wit is a volatile, fickle substance,
something that can be all-too-easily transformed into its opposite. (27)

Finally, the prologue ends with a portrayal of authorship that, far
from maintaining the image of author as distant, lofty, and
authoritative (a conception encouraged by the print medium and indeed a
conception that Pope himself cultivated in his Works), instead depicts
authorship as just another (theatrical) role or "Character"
(25), easily slipped on and off like a mask, and available to anyone in
turn--writer, critic, or reader. Thus the speaker first invites the
audience to "fit your selves--like Chaps in Monmouth-street"
to the "Sizes and ... Shapes" of the figures on the stage, for
"Poets make Characters as Salesmen Cloaths" (25). But the
costume metaphor then becomes linked to the poet himself, as the speaker
holds up a "Fool's Cap" (a jester's cap or cap with
long ears attached):

Gallants look here, this Fool's-Cap has an Air--Goodly
and smart,--with Ears of Issachar.
Let no One Man engross it, or confine:
A common Blessing! now 'tis yours, now mine.
Poets in all Ages, had the Care
To keep this Cap, for such as will, to wear;
Our Author has it now, for ev'ry Wit
Of Course resign'd it to the next that writ:
And thus upon the Stage 'tis fairly thrown,
Let him that takes it, wear it as his own.
(33-38)

Here the fool's cap, or author's cap, like a speech-act
(a "Blessing"), changes according to the context in which it
is used, just like a line of dialogue spoken on a stage. Thus neither
literature itself nor practices of literary authorship can be fitted
into print technology's promise of solidity and regulation; rather,
poetry and poethood shift their shapes and escape stable or singular
definition.

Like the prologue, several other poems written by Pope in this
period invoke an oral, immediate presence, rather than maintaining the
distance of a more "bookly" authority; indeed, as mentioned
above, several of the poems either are titled as ballads or otherwise
take a ballad form, a form that, I would argue, Pope uses quite
specifically not just to invoke oral culture, but to satirize (the
conventional uses of) print culture. "To Mr. John Moore, Author of
the Celebrated Worm-Powder" (1716) provides a rich example of this
strategy. Not just another of Pope's satires against science, the
poem specifically mocks the scientific aspirations of print as a medium,
and, crucially, it does so by way of its orally inflected form.

"To Mr. John Moore" might be most basically summarized as
a satire on our attempts to impose culture onto nature, to install order
in the world over and against the brute energies of reproduction and
decay: "How much, egregious Moor [sic], are we / Deceiv'd by
Shews and Forms! / Whate'er we think, whate'er we see, / All
Humankind are Worms" (4). Thus despite all of Mr. Moore's
(dubious) "Skill" (29),"learn[ing]" (33), and
"Art" (35), the "Fops" the "Flatterer[s],"
the "Beaus" the "Physicians," and
"Statesmen" of the world (17, 21, 23, 24, 25) nonetheless
remain defenseless against the sheer force of mortality, entropy, mess.
That is, even the most aestheticized, politicized, cosmeticized,
pharmacologized, and bureaucratized of humankind all ultimately started
from, are containers for, and will turn back into, worms--if they
weren't already in the first place: "Ev'n Button's
Wits to Worms shall turn, / Who Maggots were before" (39-40).

Even more precisely, though, the poem suggests that these
vermicious life forces thwart our attempts not just to create order in
the world, but to print order onto it. Known to Londoners through
prolific advertisements in the contemporary newspapers, (28)
Moore's worm-powder can in some ways be seen as a symbol of print
itself. His advertisements would have appeared alongside countless other
attempts by marketers at the time to sell proprietary remedies, and
these remedies arguably came to epitomize the commercial aspect of the
print medium: as Jill Campbell writes, advertisements "for books
and other printed matter" joined ads for "patent
medicines" as the "two categories of commercial notices"
that together constituted the "mainstays of advertising
columns" (29) The link was economic, but must also have come to
permeate the public's associative consciousness: according to Roy
Porter, "Printers [also] acted as distributors of medicines,
typically selling them from their offices or bookshops ... even
delivering them, through their agents and newsboys, with the newspapers
themselves." (30) Thus I would argue that Pope's jab at
Moore--who is referred to in the title, after all, the
"Author" of the celebrated worm-powder--could be read as a jab
at the arrogance of the print medium with which the powder would have
been inextricably linked--at print's claims of imperviousness to
the contingencies that threaten an embodied voice, at its belief that,
improving on the fragility of a song, a recitation, a performance, print
can preserve our experiences in tidy, reproducible, standardized blocks
of type. Just as Moore promises to halt the corrosion of the flesh,
print pretends to halt the corrosion of those forms of memory and
expression that remain dependent upon the body. Pope's poem
satirizes the medium that promoted both illusions as part of one unified
financial strategy.

Finally, what clinches the satire is arguably the poem's
orally inflected form. With its use of abab quatrains, combined with
direct apostrophe ("Ah Moore!" [29] and "O learned Friend
of Abchurch-Lane" [33]) the piece suggests a song or ballad. The
suggestion clearly spoke to Pope's contemporaries, who reprinted
"To Mr. John Moore" in collections such as The Musical
Miscellany, The Merry Musician, The Vocal Miscellany, and Vocal Melody.
(31) Thus the poem itself, though printed, gestures toward the
limitations of the medium; moreover, in its considerable afterlife in
"Musical" and "Vocal" miscellanies, "To Mr.
John Moore" contributes to a seemingly paradoxical industry: an
industry that was using print technology to sustain the very oral/aural
culture that print was (allegedly) rendering obsolete. Notably, in his
more "official" productions, Pope consistently derided such
orally oriented uses of the press, famously satirizing Ambrose Philips,
for example, for his folksily dictioned pastorals. Of course, it was
Pope's rival-pastorals, the neoclassical mirror images to
Philips's rusticated versions, that headed up Pope's Works of
1717. (32) Thus "To Mr. John Moore" presents a seeming
exception--but ultimately, I think, a complicating and enriching
addendum--to Pope's ideas about print and its uses.

The last of the 1716-17 poems I am going to examine here arguably
constitutes the most self-conscious reconsideration, on Pope's
part, of the complex relationship between print-culture on the one hand
and performative, voiced, embodied cultural forms on the other. Like the
prologue to Three Hours or "To Mr. John Moore," "Verses
Sent to Mrs. T. B. with his Works" also posits modes of art and
artisthood that defy the usual print world conventions, and mocks as
illusory print's promises of authority and orderliness. Unlike the
first two, however, "Verses" takes as its overt focus
Pope's own printed masterpiece, the 1717 Works--the very
achievement that established and confirmed Pope's identity as a
virtuoso of the print medium. Of course, "Verses" belongs to a
long tradition of poems written to or about a poet's own work: one
thinks of Ben Jonson's "To My Book" Edmund Spenser's
"To His Booke" or Robert Herrick's poem of the same
title, all of which offer, to varying degrees, both aspersions against,
and aspirations for, the strange little object they are sending into the
world. All of these poems consider the effects of print and publication.
But it seems to me that Pope's piece differs in its specific
juxtaposition of print with performance. That is, the poem points up the
peculiarly static form of "print world" theatrics--the visual
pomp and architectural grandeur involved in creating a volume like the
Works--while defining, over and against that model, a brand of
theatricality that is quintessentially performative, voiced, and
embodied.

"Verses" begins by depicting the kinds of theatricality
in which a printed text can participate--that is, for the most part, a
purely "visual" form of theater--and investigates the
effectiveness of these. At first the speaker leaves room for the
possibility that, while an artwork that depends solely on its visual
impact is necessarily limited in its effectiveness, nonetheless a
printed text could succeed in conveying meaning if a reader were to look
at it in right way. Thus the speaker suggests that the reason the Works
(or, as the poem refers to it, "the Book") is ignored--left to
lie forlornly on T. B.'s chair, "neglected" and never
"rais[ing] a Thought" (8), is that T. B. knew it "by the
bare Outside only" (2). That is, presumably if T. B. were to look
inside, the text's value would immediately strike her. However, the
next lines acknowledge that even a more thorough perusal does not
guarantee appreciation: "(Whatever was in either Good, / Not
look'd in, or, not understood)" (3-4). With its crucial,
pitiless "or," the couplet admits that looking and
understanding are not equatable--cannot be linked by any conjunction so
intimate as a "therefore," a "thus" or an
"and."

In fact, not only do the Book's visual assets not ensure its
success; its visual presence actually seems to serve as a distraction
from its meaning: once the Book is finally, explicitly
"See[n]" (10), it is seen only as an object, a mere deadweight
("See there! you're always in my Way!" 10), or
perhaps--only slightly better--just another pretty face ("I like
this Colour, I profess!" 12). Indeed, this pathetic little object
does not appear to possess even exchange value, to say nothing of its
inherent worth; it seems that T. B. would have preferred cash:
"That Red is charming all will hold, / I ever lov'd it--next
to Gold" (14). Printed books, the poem thus suggests, can only ever
exist as a visual medium, and yet this very visuality nullifies their
power.

But "Verses" also offers a solution--namely, for the Book
to come to life, to enter an oral field of apostrophe and dialogue, to
be called into interlocutory subjecthood rather than visual objecthood.
Thus while the poem ends in an affirmation of the Works' ornate
surfaces--"The gaudy Dress will save the Fool" (22)--the claim
remains disingenuous. Rather, the poem--impatient with the Book's
mute, motionless tableau--offers its own voluble and active
theatricality, into which it soon proceeds to enfold the Book as well.
Nor does "Verses" perform its role discreetly: throughout, the
lines delightedly drip with mock chivalry, striking their pose of
self-effacement with high-flying flourish. Ultimately, then, what
"save[s]" the imperiled book in this poem is not a costume
alone (red-morocco though it may be) but rather the multidimensional
theatricality enacted by the poem itself.

The first component of the poem's theatricality is its
"oral" nature. This element may seem less apparent than in a
poem like "To Mr. John Moore," with its ballad form, or the
prologue to Three Hours, which is obviously intended to be vocalized:
"Verses" is in couplet-form rather than the more
ballad-evoking abab quatrains, and is, after all, "Sent"--as a
letter, in a parcel--rather than spoken. Nonetheless, the poem is in
tetrameters (not Pope's trademark heroic couplets), and thus
creates a more singsong rhythm; it apostrophizes its addressees directly
(starting with Mrs. T. B.), thereby invoking a conversational setting;
and it includes snippets of what we might call dramatic dialogue,
incorporating T.B's (imagined) exclamations in a voice that remains
distinct from the speaker's "own" language, and thus
sustains a sense of multiple characterization and interchange.

The poem's true feat of theater, however, lies not in its
orality bur rather in the "use" to which it puts its oral
interjections: namely, through the use of performative
interpellations--i.e., of speech-acts that call to an entity and
therefore render it "present" to the poem, as an entity
imagined to be capable of hearing and perhaps talking back. That is, in
two progressive stages, "Verses" calls the Book into a kind of
personhood, first as a kind of double or shadow for the author, and,
then, second, in its own right, as the author's partner in
conversation--displacing, indeed, the official (and, we might say,
"real-life") interlocutor of the poem, T. B. (whom we could
imagine to be Pope's friend Teresa Blount).

At first the Book only "approximates" the status of
living creature, reaching it via simile only: the speaker tells us that
it is "like its Author" (1). The Book is gradually promoted,
however, from being "like" the writer to becoming blurred with
him as a conscious conversation partner, and, finally, replacing him
outright. The promotion of the Book to the status of potentially heeding
interlocutor takes place, interestingly, at the moment when T. B. first
speaks. That is, at the same moment that T. B. emerges as a linguistic
rival to the speaker/Author (the poem's title informs us that the
two are one and the same), she simultaneously introduces the Book as yet
another potential rival--addressing it as if she expects a response:
"See there! you're always in my Way!" (10). Moreover,
because of the grammatical ambiguity created by the initial simile, the
"you" of this line can refer to either the Book or the Author;
thus, any agency won by the Book at this point represents a loss of
agency for the Author.

But this uncomfortably shared linguistic agency of Author and Book
soon shifts over to the Book alone, when the speaker/Author declares,
"She keeps thee, Book! I'll lay my Head" (19). The Book
has now definitively reached the status of addressee ("thee,
Book!"); meanwhile, the Author "lay[s] his Head" as if to
sleep now that the book has awakened into life.

And indeed, arguably the "Author" never speaks again:
each of the final three lines of the poem could be read as either a
quotation or a kind of gnomic aphorism:

Line 20 still seems to be half-quoting T. B. (or some similar
recipient of a pretty red book); and certainly the use of italics
recalls her voice (all of her lines so far have been in italics) or at
least suggests quotation in general (Pope often used italics for this
purpose). But while line 20 cannot be attributed with full confidence,
lines 21 and 22 are almost impossible to pin down. We might initially
see them as simply a final piece of parting advice from Author to Book
("No, trust the ... Rule!"). But the advice seems too
abstracted to belong to the speaker/Author that we have come to know:
semi-detached from the world of the poem, these lines have left T. B.
far behind, instead making proclamations about "the Sex" as a
whole. In any case, the final line (i.e., the "Rule" itself)
is indisputably a quotation. Bur again, attribution is impossible: we
could assign it--if we agree to adopt the poem's own bewildering vagueness--to "the Sex"; even more amorphously, we might trace
it to some sort of transcendent, sanctified source (after all, it is a
"sacred" Rule).

Perhaps these last two lines work best if we do not attempt to see
them as continuous with the rest of the poem, but rather as a gesture
most familiar to us from the drama: namely, as the rhyming couplet at
the end of an act. That is, just as in a play, when a character steps to
the front of the stage and sums up the action in a kind of abstracted
adage or punch line, this final couplet is not spoken "from
within" the narrative situation, but rather comments upon it.
(William Wycherley's Country Wife provides some typical examples,
as with "Who for his business from his wife will run, / Takes the
best care to have her business done"; or "The gallant treats
presents, and gives the ball; / But 'tis the absent cuckold pays
for all." (33) In both instances the speaker is not speaking to
another character in the play, and is not even speaking "in
character" per se, but rather addresses the audience as a kind of
"chorus" just at the very border of the play's fiction.)
In other words, perhaps the end of "Verses" represents not the
parting words of the poem's speaker/Author to T. B., or to his
Book, but rather an actor's wink to the audience, a dramatic
exposure of the poem's generic frame. The speaker/Author has
disappeared, the Book has come to life, and the poem takes a bow for
performing such a marvelous magic trick.

This group of poems by Pope, then, combined with my reading of
Three Hours After Marriage, suggest that while eighteenth-century
literature was becoming ever-more concerned with the world of print and
reading, the period's understanding of print did not exclude
categories of theatricality, or see print and theater as mutually
exclusive. Rather, I think we can begin to outline an eighteenth-century
conception of print-based literature that embraced orality and
performativity, and adopted techniques from these other modes so as to
create a kind of hybrid medium.

VI. "The Child cries"

Of course, the very symbol of this hybridity can be found in the
tiny but troublesome child at the end of Three Hours After Marriage--who
indeed embodies a crystallization of transgression and (literally)
bastardization. Ultimately, I want to argue, it is this child and the
values associated with him that "triumph" in the end of the
play. For, as we have noted, this is a play in which there emerges no
real winner or loser: Townley's apparent goal in the play has been
to achieve the security of marriage while avoiding its distinct
unsexiness; but this plan fails spectacularly when her first husband, a
sea captain, claims precedence, and her adulterous suitors are exposed.
On the other hand, Townley also escapes any real punishment and remains
free from Fossile's grasp. Meanwhile, Fossile's aim of
acquiring an "heir of his own begetting" (and thus to
disinherit his niece) fails just as badly; yet, as he stands with
Townley's baby in his arms, he himself declares, "Fossile[,]
thou didst want Posterity: Here behold thou hast it" (3.550-51).
Thus it remains impossible to say who or what Three Hours
"rewards" in its final scene--unless we consider the baby, and
what he represents, as the true object of the play's loyalties.

Part of what the child represents could be described as the
importance of keeping language tethered to an embodied experience. For
example, as Fossile and his colleague Doctor Possum discuss who should
take responsibility for the child, detailing the "Five ...
Proofs" distinguishing "Legitimation" from
"Filiation" (Possum explains that the former is necessary to
the latter "but not e contra"), their jargony jangling is
interrupted by the infant's reminder--inarticulate and yet
incontestable--of the urgent reality at hand: "The Child
cries" (413).

But the child's insistence on a physical reality amidst
verbality is not simply an endorsement of the corporeal over the
book-bound quibbling of Fossile and his colleagues. Recall that Townley
and her suitors use physicality as a kind of trump to Fossile's
world of catalogues, indexes, and documentation; but the play does not
seem to endorse this strategy. Indeed, the physical drives of Townley
and the rakes seem to point only toward a kind of anarchy: we are
relieved at the end that Townley is reined in, at least temporarily.
Like the worms overpowering Moore's worm-powder, she and her
collaborators make a mockery of any attempt to impose order onto a messy
world; Three Hours does not seem to accept this level of nihilism.
Instead, the play puts forth the child as a symbol of a kind of
corporeality that is still in keeping with some fundamental level of
civilization. That is, on the one hand the baby expresses the basic,
animal needs of the body (his cry, at least to Fossile's ears, is a
cry of hunger: Fossile immediately calls for "Water-Pap";
415). But the child also helps to repair the damage that the body and
its hungers--in this case, Townley's voracious sexuality--have
inflicted upon the spirit: taking the baby in his arms, Fossile
relinquishes his sexual jealousy, concluding, "What must be, must
be.... What signifies whether a Man beget his Child or not?"
(556-57).

Of course, such a statement on Fossile's part demonstrates a
momentary relinquishing of his desire to gain mastery not just over
Townley, but also over the legalistic and literalistic minutiae with
which he has crowded his life. In other words, while the baby exerts a
moderating force on the active, embodied antics of Townley and the
rakes--on their theatrical (indeed, "meta-theatricar")
libertinism--he also helps to temper Fossile's obsession with the
documentative, definitional ambitions deriving from print culture. Thus
this child represents a kind of temporary coming together of the two
modes. Though Fossile and Townley part ways, the child provides an
abiding link between them, belonging genetically to one, adoptively to
the other. As such the child testifies to a union--of persons, of
modes--that, while appearing to be an utter mismatch, nonetheless proved
surprisingly fruitful.

Moreover, what I hope to have suggested in the above pages is that
this cross-breeding of print and performance not only bears fruit for
the retrospective reader, but also struck eighteenth-century writers as
a fascinating possibility. That is, by mixing the two modes, authors
could explore new ways of thinking about the powers and limitations of
different genres, about the ways that cultural forms--whether theatrical
or textual, communal or private, embodied or inscribed--affect the way
we perceive and interact with our world. Thus in Three Hours After
Marriage and the poems that Pope wrote during that play's period of
emergence, we find a group of texts that are actively problematizing the
relationship between page and stage, pushing each mode to its limits,
and mixing the two together. These texts suggest, I think, that the
eighteenth-century literary imagination--rather than simply seeing print
and performance as mutually exclusive--may have delighted in the notion
of the two modes' volatile coexistence.

University of Rochester

NOTES

(1) The original group also included Thomas Parnell and Robert
Harley, Earl of Oxford; Henry Fielding is usually considered a kind of
heir to the Scriblerian sensibility. (See Charles Kerby-Miller's
critical introduction to John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift,
John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Hartley, Memoirs of the
Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed.
Charles Kerby-Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988].)

(2) As Kerby-Miller writes, "The first direct move toward the
formation of the Scriblerus Club was made in October 1713, when Pope
approached Swift with a proposal that they and their friends collaborate
on a burlesque monthly periodical in which follies in learning and
criticism would be satirized in ironic reviews that depreciated works of
merit and cried up the productions of Grub Street" (14). See also
Marlon B. Ross, "Authority and Authenticity: Scribbling Authors and
the Genius of Print in Eighteenth-Century England," in The
Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature,
ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Chapel Hill: Duke University
Press, 1994).

(4) J. Paul Hunter, "The World as Stage and Closet" in
British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660-1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), 286.

(5) Scholars generally date the Restoration theater as having ended
around 1700; Aphra Behn's Oroonoko was published in 1688; Daniel
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719.

(6) For a reading of Clinket as a commentary on female playwriting,
and for a summary of past reactions to this figure, see Lisa A. Freeman,
Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century
Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 67-72.

(7) John Gay (et al.), Three Hours After Marriage, in Dramatic
Works, vol. 1, ed. John Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1.72. As
this citation reflects, the play is not divided into scenes, but rather
acts and line numbers. All references are to this edition and cited
parenthetically in the text.

(8) The Pillars of Seth were apparently two pillars created by the
descendants of Seth and inscribed with scientific discoveries and
inventions, with the idea of preserving this knowledge in the face of a
fire and flood predicted by Adam.

(9) See David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book
Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). See
also James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001).

(19) An Essay on Criticism, in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on
Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven: Yale University
Press [Twickenham edition], 1961), ll. 169-74. All citations are from
this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

(22) Certainly scholarship on Scriblerianism emphasizes these
attitudes; thus, Brean Hammond describes Pope's self-appointed role
as "a conduit of opposition to some of the major cultural
tendencies that he saw as prevalent in his period: professionalization of writing, increasing literary production, literary production
undertaken by socially inappropriate individuals ... [,] patronization of worthless writers, hybridization, and debasement of literary
forms" (Professional Imaginative Writing in England: Hackney for
Bread [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 10). Likewise, Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White explain Pope's objection to the
"dunce" writers of the period as an objection to their
"act of mediation": "[Pope's targets] occupy a
taboo-laden space between the topographical boundaries which mark off
the discrete sites of high and low culture. They transgress domains,
moving between fair, theatre, town and court, threatening to sweep away
the literary and social marks of difference at the very point where such
differences are being widened.... The social and aesthetic interfusion of high and low has its counterpart at the linguistic level where a
grotesque hybridization threatens to subvert the distinction between
words and genres." As Stallybrass and White admit, Pope did
not--could not--steer completely clear of such hybridization. But in
their account, "mess" and "Chaos" sneak up on Pope,
like a repressed obsession; Staltybrass and White make no allowance for
a deliberate, willing engagement on Pope's part with intergeneric
interfusion (Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics
of Transgression [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986], 113-15).

(25) I am basing the poems' dates on the work done by the
Twickenham editors; the poems are reprinted, with their publication
dates and possible composition dates, in an order that attempts to
reproduce their original chronology, in Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and
John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press [Twickenham edition], 1964).

(26) Other than the pieces written in this period, I believe only
"Duke upon Duke ... an excellent new Ballad" (1720) and
"The Discovery ... An Excellent New Ballad" (1726) explicitly
announce themselves as such.

(27) "To dash" means "to destroy," "to
ruin" (OED def. 6), and this sense seems in keeping with
Pope's larger point here, but also, more specifically to
Pope's metaphor, it can mean "to splash (water or
liquid)" (3b), or "to ... dilute with some (usually inferior)
admixture" (5a). Yet the word also refers literally to the act of
writing--"to put down on paper, throw off, write, or sketch"
(8), "to draw a dash through (writing); to strike out, cancel,
erase, efface" (9); thus the dash-work described here can be seen
to refer, simultaneously, to Pope's analogy--to wine as a metaphor
for a play--and yet also back to the playwriting itself, i.e., in
abandonment of the metaphor. Pope is at once changing writing into wine
and back again. In this way he does not simply describe the ways that a
literary work can change shape, but (performatively) demonstrates such
shape-shifting in action, albeit on a miniature scale.